8 Leaders Loop skills on corporate development (m&a & partnerships). Read each one, then prove it with a short Skill Check to build toward your Leaders Loop Credentials.
Three methods do almost all the work in any deal, discounted cash flow, comparable companies, and precedent transactions. None gives you "the" number. Knowing what each one secretly measures is the whole skill.
The cheque clears on Day Zero. The value, almost all of it, is made or lost in the months that follow. Integration is the part of an acquisition that the spreadsheet can't do for you.
An ecosystem isn't a longer list of partners, it's a structure you design so that other companies make your product more valuable than you ever could alone. Here's how it works, why most attempts collapse, and what to do instead.
Due diligence is the disciplined investigation that turns a deal you hope is good into one you can prove is good, or walk away from with your money intact. Done as a checklist, it confirms what you already decided. Done well, it changes the price.
Most acquisitions never earn back what was paid for them. The fix isn't a cleverer spreadsheet, it's being honest, up front, about why you're buying and what has to be true for the price to make sense.
Three ways to grow with someone else's resources instead of buying the whole company, and why most of them disappoint. Here's how the forms differ, what the evidence says, and the handful of moves that actually move the odds.
Buying gets the headlines, but selling well is the rarer skill. Done with discipline, separating a business out of the group can create more value than the next acquisition, and the evidence has said so for thirty years.
A synergy is a promise made in a boardroom and kept, or broken, by a sales rep, a plant manager and an IT lead eighteen months later. This is how to estimate the promise honestly and actually collect on it.
Leaders Loop
